THE SEXUAL FREEDOM COALITION

Dr Tanya Byron is a clinical psychologist specialising in child and adolescent services. She became known on TV for presenting a number of TV parenting programmes - most famously the 'House of Tiny Tearaways' for the BBC. Unusually for an expert, she resigned from the show when the producers wanted to make it more dramatic as she wanted to protect the children and families involved.

Tanya has always taken a firm stand on so-called 'experts' who just say anything to get in the papers, psychologists who act unethically and demanded that psychology be underpinned by an evidence based approach.

She is well regarded among her peers and always appears to be professional around her clinical work. There are some who'll disapprove of her media work (she also produced a TV comedy series with Jennifer Saunders).

Tanya was commissioned by the government to head up a report on the impact of the Internet on children. This is not an investigation into adult use of the net, but instead is supposed to focus on issues like using the net, bullying on-line, parental awareness of Internet content - and does include sexual content.

Her report is actually not that bad and seems pretty sensible, and a fair(ish) account of the data. We suspect the issue is going to be in the media treatment of it, rather than it's contents.

Tanya has definitely put the child at the centre of the report and makes some important conclusions around sexual content including the right to explore sexual sites, that adults may see this as a problem, that children often aren't interested in/bothered by explicit images (or don't understand them), and that one person's 'porn' may be a child's 'sex education'.

She accepts there's not enough causal evidence out there and the Internet is simply another area for moral panic - as were violent video games or stag films in the past.

Our only criticism would be that she has either only looked at the anti porn literature on this, or has selectively done so. So she draws upon Cathy Itzin's work on porn rather than a more balanced approach (for example Dennis Howitt's work). But then Itzin is an advisor to the government so perhaps that's why.

The report isn't making any major bold claims, nor really saying that all porn on the Internet should be banned. It does seem to be saying that parents should monitor their kids access to the net or computer games - which most people would agree with.

This means if we have any negative press - particularly about adults, it's easy to say that the report highlights this is an issue for parental control and empowering kids to make wise decisions. It isn't calling for all porn or SM to be banned. So journalists suggesting as much should go read it before generalising about something they've not seen.